Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

The killers cut off Coligny’s head and dispatched it to the royal palace; it would eventually be embalmed and sent to Rome for the Pope to admire. Meanwhile the rest of the body was thrown out of the window to the street, where a Catholic crowd set fire to it and dragged it around the district. The body fell to pieces as it smoldered, but segments were paraded about and further mutilated for days.

The commotion at Coligny’s house caused further panic among Parisian Catholics as well as Protestants. Catholic gangs rushed onto the streets; they seized and killed any recognizable Protestants, and burst into houses where Protestants were known to live — and where many were sleeping peacefully, having no idea what was going on in the city. The mobs dragged them outside, slit their throats or tore them to pieces, then set fire to their bodies or threw them in the river. The mayhem attracted larger and larger crowds, and fueled further atrocities. To pick just one reported incident, a man named Mathurin Lussault was killed when he made the mistake of answering his door; his son came down to investigate the noise and was stabbed too. Lussault’s wife, Françoise, tried to escape by leaping from her upstairs window into a neighbor’s courtyard. She broke both her legs. The neighbor helped her, but the attackers burst in and dragged her into the street by her hair. They cut off her hands to get her gold bracelets, then impaled her on a spit; later they dumped her body in the river. The hands, chewed by dogs, were still to be seen outside the building several days later. Similar scenes took place all over the city, and so many bodies were thrown into the Seine that it was said to run red with blood.

Whatever Charles had intended by the original assassination — if indeed he was responsible — he can hardly have intended this. He now ordered his soldiers to suppress the violence, but it was too late. The killing went on for nearly a week through the districts of Paris, then spread around the rest of the country. In Paris alone, the massacres, which were known for ever more by the name of St. Bartholomew, left up to five thousand dead. By the end some ten thousand had been killed in France. Cities were sucked into the violence like fishing-boats into a tornado: Orléans, Lyon, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and countless smaller towns.

It was a furor of the kind Montaigne detested even on a traditional battlefield, but here the victims were civilians. On the whole, so were the killers; only in a few places were soldiers or officials involved. Bordeaux was one of these few. Nothing happened there until October 3, but when it did, it was apparently organized and approved by the fanatical Catholic mayor of the time, Charles de Montferrand, who produced a formal list of targets to be attacked. In most places, the bloodshed was done more chaotically and by people who would have been reasonable folk the rest of the time. In Orléans, the mob stopped at taverns between killings to celebrate, “accompanied by singing, lutes and guitars,” according to one historian. Some groups were composed mainly of women or children. Catholics interpreted the presence of the latter as a sign that God Himself was in favor of the massacres, for He had caused even innocents to take part. In general, many thought that, since the killings were on no ordinary human scale, they must have been divinely sanctioned. They were not the result of human decisions; they were messages from God to humanity, portents of cosmic mayhem just as much as a blighted harvest or a comet in the sky. A medal made in Rome to commemorate the massacres showed the Huguenots struck down, not by fellow mortals, but by an armed angel shining with holy wrath. In general, the new Pope, Gregory XIII, seems to have been pleased with events in France. Apart from the medal, he commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint celebratory frescos in the Sala Regia of the Vatican. The French king likewise took part in processions of thanksgiving, and had two medals struck, one portraying himself as Hercules doing battle with the Hydra, the other depicting him on his throne surrounded by naked corpses and holding a palm frond to represent victory.

Once the Huguenots had collected themselves and gathered armies to fight back, all-out war broke out again. It would continue through the 1570s, with only occasional pauses. The St. Bartholomew’s events formed a dividing line. After this, the wars were more anarchic, and more driven by fanaticism. Besides ordinary battles, much misery was now caused by uncontrolled gangs of soldiers on the rampage, even during supposed peace interludes, when they had no masters and no pay. Peasants sometimes fled and lived wild in the forests rather than wait in town to be attacked and sometimes tortured for the fun of it. This was the state of nature with a vengeance. In 1579, one provincial lawyer, Jean La Rouvière, wrote to the king to beg help for the rustic poor in his area—“miserable, martyrized, and abandoned men” who lived off the land as best they could, having lost all they had. Among the horrors he had seen or heard of were tales of people

buried alive in heaps of manure, thrown into wells and ditches and left to die, howling like dogs; they had been nailed in boxes without air, walled up in towers without food, and garroted upon trees in the depths of the mountains and forests; they had been stretched in front of fires, their feet fricasseed in grease; their women had been raped and those who were pregnant had been aborted; their children had been kidnapped and ransomed, or even roasted alive before the parents.

The wars were fed by religious ardor, but the sufferings of war in turn generated further apocalyptic imaginings. Both Catholics and Protestants thought that events were approaching a point beyond which there could be no more normal history, for all that remained was the final confrontation between God and the Devil. This is why Catholics celebrated the St. Bartholomew’s massacres so joyfully: they saw them as a genuine victory over evil, and as a way of driving countless misled individuals back to the true Church before it was too late for them to save their souls.

It all mattered a great deal, because time was short. In the Last Days, Christ would return, the world would be obliterated, and everyone would have to justify his or her actions to God. There could be no compromise in such a situation, no seeing the other person’s point of view, and certainly no mutual understanding between rival faiths. Montaigne, with his praise of ordinary life and of mediocrity, was selling something that could have no market in a doomed world.

Signs of the imminence of this Apocalypse were plentiful. A series of famines, ruined harvests, and freezing winters in the 1570s and 1580s indicated that God Himself was withdrawing His warmth from the earth. Smallpox, typhus, and whooping cough swept through the country, as well as the worst disease of all: the plague. All four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seemed to have been unleashed: pestilence, war, famine, and death. A werewolf roamed the country, conjoined twins were born in Paris, and a new star — a nova — exploded in the sky. Even those not given to religious extremism had a feeling that everything was speeding towards some indefinable end. Montaigne’s editor, Marie de Gournay, later remembered the France of her youth as a place so abandoned to chaos “that one was led to expect a final ruin, rather than a restoration, of the state.” Some thought the end was very nigh indeed: the linguist and theologian Guillaume Postel wrote in a letter of 1573 that “within eight days the people will perish.”